Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Adam D'Angelo On Quora And The Future Of The Internet - BuzzFeed News

Q&A with Quora's CEO

"Can you articulate what the core problem Quora is trying to solve, on a technical and more general level, and how far along the company is?
AD: There’s actually a lot of problems that all fit together. We’re trying to keep quality high, that’s very important for us. If you look at all these other efforts before Quora, to get knowledge onto the internet, a lot of them suffered from quality [issues]. That’s a big problem. We need to build systems that can automatically figure out what’s high quality and what’s not, and encourage users to contribute high-quality content. There’s a lot of technical challenges in that.
We’re basically building this map of who the experts are in every given topic of knowledge. For any area of knowledge, we want to know who the people who know the most about that are, and should be answering questions, so when we have questions we can show them to the right people. So it’s this technical challenge around building out this map of areas of knowledge, and this database of who the experts are and automatically updating that over time."